My next MP scenario - community thoughts?

[JPetroski]

I've had quite a bit of fun playing Over the Reich with Prof. Garfield, and I'm starting to more seriously weight what other multiplayer scenarios I would like to build (after OTR is finished). I have three scenarios that I've been thinking about over the years and am wondering what one the community would find more fun. One is a classic empire builder where there is the chance of proxy wars and the other is an all-out fight for 2-3 players from the start, with slots for empire builders who eventually will join the fray. The third is a reskin of Over the Reich for the Battle of Britain.

I'm being careful to make these scenarios something that could be played by 2 players playing multiple civs because I'm not sure how many players will still be active when they are finished!

I do have a few questions though:

1. How long is too long for a turn? If you were actually fighting/plotting a war and not just dealing with economics would the length of the turn matter less? (I've found it is much more fun to launch attacks than drive trade ships around).

2. Would an "imbalanced" scenario work? Both of these are imbalanced. Both of these have certain civs that are going to have a tough time and would require a more-skilled player at the helm. My thought is that if each side has advantages they can exploit, it is more fun than if everyone is equal.

Anyway, here are the options:

1. The Cold War: 1947
-My take on the Cold War, but starting much earlier than most. It would begin just as the Truman Doctrine is announced and shortly before the Marshall Plan.
-I'm interested to see if one nation with a huge navy and access to nuclear weapons (US) is enough to thwart another nation with a massive army (USSR)
-Much of the world starts off in rubble from WW2 and needs to be rebuilt
-Much of the world hasn't chosen a side yet and there will be plenty of room for proxy wars

-For 2-5 players
*USA
*USSR
*The People's Republic of China
*Brazil
*India
*The Capitalists (likely played by US player)
*The Socialists (likely played by USSR player)
*The non-aligned (Barbarians)

2. The Hinge of Fate
-A massive multiplayer, WW2 European theatre scenario that takes advantage of Lua to allow true east/west movement over multiple maps. I'd utilize this to include the Northeast United States and Canada on one map, and would use a slightly modified version of McMonkey's Fortress Europe map for the other. I had toyed with having a third map that extends into Russia but I like the strategic bombing aspects from OTR enough that I think I'll have low and high alt for each of these maps (if the Germans do well, Go229 "Amerika" bombers might actually head towards America).
-The scenario would take place in May, 1940 so the USA and USSR players (or AI at the time) would have to build up their strength over time and potentially pursue different tech paths that would allow them to aid the UK.
-I have some mechanisms in mind that would encourage the Germans to invade the USSR and later declare war on the USA, but that wouldn't compel them to by a certain date, so there would always be some uncertainty as to when an attack might come
-This scenario would be for between 2-5 players.
*Germany
*Italy (I might just combine this with Germany and use lua to enforce certain units in certain cities).
*British Empire
*United States
*USSR
*France
*Minor Powers (with lua I could probably keep conflicts localized).
-This scenario would require the German player to be very skilled because eventually everyone will dog pile them.

3. The Battle of Britain
-A "reskin" of Over the Reich, this time a multiplayer match between the Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe.
-Definitely the quickest of the three to complete since much of the lua coding would directly translate with only the need to rewrite some tables.

Thoughts?

 

[Patine]

@JPetroski I would very much like to see the Battle of Britain. It's a scenario concept that has been brought up a few times over the years, and I think, Nemo, was it, gave a try at making a scenario around the subject, but I believe I heard, second hand, he gave up, deeming it an impossible project by what was possible at the time. Thus, as far as I know, a finished scenario on this topic is an undiscovered country.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I think the problems he had were mainly AI related.(the AI never doing what it was supposed to)

 

[JPetroski]

I playtested The Blitz and due to my interest in aviation was involved in the development (basically just talking about it a lot with Captain Nemo - I didn't do any actual work). It was a very fun scenario for the first several turns and well on its way to being another fine installment after Red Front and Second Front. The critical issue Nemo couldn't get past was how the usually idiotic AI becomes clinically brain dead when dealing with massive amounts of air units. Nemo could not get the "go to" command to work well for aircraft and what wound up happening, like clockwork, was the AI would stack up to 90 (no joke) aircraft on one hex (often, without even attacking) which altered the experience drastically from what he was seeking. I always thought it was kind of fun regardless but I can see why it frustrated him. It's too bad that it seems to have frustrated him enough to abandon Civ2 ever after!

Anyway, my curiosity is if someone said "hey, let's start up a match of...." And they gave the choices above, who would actually play it? Because there's zero point in building a MP scenario that won't find an audience these days.

 

[Prof. Garfield]

If you don't have a strong preference either way, perhaps you should consider doing the one that can most easily be released under a GPL license (i.e. one where you can get all the art assets from someone who is still around and can give explicit permission for that purpose). The reasoning is that from time to time people from the FreeCiv community stop by looking for art and/or scenarios. If you provide something that they are explicitly allowed to include with their game, they might end up converting it and you would get a larger audience that way. With lua events, they should be able to look at the TOTPP lua specification and write an equivalent events interface with relatively minimal effort.

 

[JPetroski]

Does freeciv have a large multiplayer community? I basically just want to know which one of these I can convince the rest of you to play =)

 

[Prof. Garfield]

Does freeciv have a large multiplayer community? I basically just want to know which one of these I can convince the rest of you to play =)

I don't know (I don't play FreeCiv), but it's clearly legally free to distribute (instead of the "we think it's abandonware" free of ToT) and the community here is very small, so the community there wouldn't have to be very large to get a boost in users. I wouldn't make a less appealing (to you) scenario just so you can let the FreeCiver's have it, but if you can't decide anyway, it might tip the scale. They've been interested in scenarios in the past, and if they had one or two scenarios that they could explicitly test with and put into their project, they might go to the trouble of building a scenario converter (and let their users do the converting on no-license scenarios).

The Battle of Britain seems least interesting to me, simply because there is already Over the Reich. Of course, it would be the easiest to make, for that reason. However, you might have to go through a lot of events and double check that it is attached to 'unitAliases' and not the integer ID of the unit the event was usually created for.

Your focus on 2 player play ability is a good one, but I would also suggest finding a concept that could be played in, say, 50 turns or so. That way even 5 or 6 players can expect the game to last only a year or so if they are relatively prompt in playing. Regarding imbalance of players, if there are more than two, then it is less of an issue to have stronger and weaker civs. The more players, the less of an issue imbalance is.

 

[JPetroski]

Well, The Hinge of Fate probably fits that bill the best. If I went for 1 turn = 1 month, it would be 60 turns which isn't unreasonably far off your 50 suggestion. I had planned on making every turn 2 weeks in that scenario and could still do this and just offer a version where movement speed, production, science, etc. is all doubled for a faster game. It's simple enough to double everything across the board and perhaps that would wind up being the more popular way to play it.

 

[McMonkey]

Personally, I'd go for 1. The Cold War: 1947, though they all sound good. I'd save the WW2 scenario until we've really explored the full potential of Lua & put all the experience into one grand scenario. Battle of Britain sounds good too, but I can see the cold war scenario being more attractive to the multiplayer crowd. Imperialism, Colonies & First Strike have all been popular for PBEM over the years and to have a Korea, Malaya, Suez, Cuban Missile Crisis, Berlin Airlift period scenario would be interesting.

 

[voltar]

I'd love to PBEM a WW2 scenario

Cold war is cool to if we can work in a a lot of proxy conflicts and stuff without going full scale nuclear turn 2.

 

[JPetroski]

I'd save the WW2 scenario until we've really explored the full potential of Lua & put all the experience into one grand scenario.

Lua's actually pretty-well expanded upon at this point... Knighttime and Prof. Garfield have really run with the work Grishnach and @TheNamelessOne started and taken it to new heights. Over the Reich has a *ton* of new features that can be used for a WW2 Europe scenario and I suspect that Napoleon by tootall_2012 and Knighttime will add to this considerably. I have almost all the "stuff" I need to make a WW2 scenario:

-Full functional strategic bombing mechanism
-A reaction mechanism that opens up combat in totally new ways
-Revolt risk / reward and penalty for certain units being or not being in a certain place
-the ability to have true east/west map transport capability
-the ability to swap out cities en masse from a single trigger (The fall of Paris could give the Germans the entire French Atlantic Coast without them needing to capture everything, and a single "neutral" civ could have some of its cities move to "Axis/Allied Minors").
-the ability to transfer veterancy from one unit to another as they upgrade equipment (without having to worry about Leonardo's).

Additionally, there's whispers from Napoleon that it'll include something called a "leader bonus" which I can't wait to try out and they've been charging ahead with diplomacy.

Really the only two things that I need that haven't been conquered yet (to my knowledge) is some sort of way of making encirclements mean something (perhaps by reducing encircled units MP or combat effectiveness somehow) and a working supply chain (so Malta might really mean something to the Afrika Korps). But, every new scenario is going to bring something new to the table and perhaps Hinge of Fate could bring this.

If I were to build Hinge of Fate I'd probably rework the civs:

1. Germany
2. Axis Minors (Includes Italy, but serves as a civ that neutral civs can transfer cities too depending on decisions made by the different parties).
3. British Empire
4. Allied Minors (Includes France at first, but again - will receive and lose cities throughout the game. For example, Greece might join).
5. United States
6. Soviet Union
7. Neutral Powers (starts huge and dormant and serves to have certain cities transfer elsewhere depending on what happens - probably would reset "peace" with them after the city transfer).

Something like this could make for interesting gameplay where there could potentially be many small conflicts that are player vs. player. Almost like proxy wars though of course there'd be a full-fledged WW2 raging elsewhere - you could also find yourself fighting the Winter War, etc.